October 4 continues to wound and reopen wounds in Darjeeling.
The date that once unleashed the 1968 landslides, killing nearly a thousand, returned in 2023 with the aftermath of a glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF) that claimed more than 100 lives. This year, rains that began on October 4 have claimed at least 33 lives.
For many in the hills, the date is no longer just a number but a memory etched in loss.
Purna Bahadur Rai, 79, a retired army personnel from Rangbhang in Mirik sub-division, was witness to the October 4 devastation 57 years ago.
“I clearly remember the events of October 4, 1968, as I had just returned home for a holiday from the army,” recalled Purna.
On October 4, 1968, coinciding as this year with Dashain celebrations, a portion of Purna’s land had been washed by the torrential landslide.
“This time too, I lost a portion of my land,” said Purna.
According to Met records, the region received four days of continuous rainfall between October 2 and 5, 1968, that had triggered hundreds of landslides, swept houses and bridges away and killed around 1,000 people.
Dipak Shrestha, who was a Class VIII student at St Augustine’s School in Kalimpong in 1968, recounted his horror on social media.
“For a boy of 13, it was a sight both terrifying and unforgettable. Even now, decades later, that haunting image returns to me at times, a stark reminder of nature’s power and fragility of everything we build against it,”
wrote Shrestha.
Leszek Starkel, a professor of Polish Academy of Sciences who has been studying landslides in this part of the country for several decades, provided an overview of the downpour this
region received.
“I had first come to Darjeeling to study the evolution of mountains in 1968. I was amazed at the destruction. The region had received 1,000mm of rainfall in 52 hours, equivalent to two years of rainfall in Poland,” Starkel had earlier told this newspaper.
This year, it started raining from raining intermitted from October 1 but the rain turned into a continuous downpour from the morning of
October 4.
Some areas in the region received around 300mm of rainfall in 12 hours.
Unlike the torrential rains witnessed in 1968 and this year, the devastation on October 4 in 2023 was brutally silent.
The glacial outburst of South Lonark Lake in Sikkim occurred late on October 3. On the intervening night of October 3 and 4, the floods swept away India’s second largest dam, the 1,200MW Sikkim Urja Teesta–III hydel project built at a cost of ₹13,965 crores. The rampaging waters washed away 33 bridges, damaging around 3,600 houses and 920 shops and affecting around 88,000 people
in Sikkim.
In Kalimpong district of Bengal, 483 houses were fully damaged and 76 houses were partially damaged when water gushed into their houses silently at night.
Over 100 people lost their lives during the GLOF.
Such was the scale of destruction that the Sikkim government presented a post disaster need assessment report to Prime Minister Narendra Modi estimating that the state would require ₹3,673.25 crore for recovery and
reconstruction.
In Teesta bazar under Kalimpong sub-division many are yet to rebuild their home for want of proper support from the administration. The administration has not been unable to protect the Darjeeling-Kalimpong route along the Teesta Bazar stretch that invariably gets submerged in the swollen Teesta after heavy rains.